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I ran into an interesting little issue in a Django application today that led to what I thought was some pretty powerful stuff in Python and Django that I hadn't had to use before, so I thought I'd share.

I'm working on an application that to keep it generic I'll simply say deals with requests from users, and these requests require various levels of approval depending on the type and severity of the request.

Here's a basic Django model class that contains the fields relative to this example:

Basic stuff so far.

Where the wrinkle comes in is there is a page in the application that lists the requests ordered by date, but the date by which each request will be displayed and sorted depends upon the impact of the request as follows:minor: use datetime_supervisor_approvedmajor: use datetime_admin_approvedsevere: use datetime_president_approved
To state the issues succinctly:The date on which I want to sort varies for each requestI don't want to store an additional, r…

If you follow me on Google+ you'll know I had a recent rant about Windows Media Center, which after running fine for about a year suddenly decided as of January 29 it was done downloading the program guide and by extension was therefore done recording any TV shows.

I'll spare you more ranting and simply say that none of the suggestions I got (which I appreciate!) worked, and rather than spending more time figuring out why, I decided to try something different.

NextPVR is an awesome free (as in beer, not as in freedom unfortunately ...) PVR application for Windows that with a little bit of tweaking handily replaced Windows Media Center. It can even download guide data, which is apparently something WMC no longer feels like doing.

Background
I wound up going down this road in a rather circuitous way. My initial goal for the weekend project was to get Raspbmc running on one of my Raspberry Pis. The latest version of XBMC has PVR functionality so I was anxious to try that out as a …